5th Consortial Meeting

16. March 2017, by Štefan Emrich

Last week the 5th consortial meeting of the VALiD research project took place, hosted by the FH Joanneum in Graz on Thursday. The key topics of the meeting were revolving around machine-learning algorithms used for natural language processing (NLP).

One core question was how the project’s comprehensive database of political speeches could be better explored with sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis, the classification of text based on the sentiment of the content (polite, incivil, ironic, …), is a science on its own. To make matters worse, the majority of the research is focused on the English language, which is one of the simpler languages. Hence the methods and approaches for German, which is more complex, are technically far less mature.

Another hot topic was if and how far the algorithms and the data used to train these, are subject to gender & diversity bias. While this topic has reached the science community, its full implications are still not being grasped to the full extent. Here is a highly recommended read on this increasingly important topic!

Due to the nature of the meeting (i.e. the whole research team getting a thorough update and discussing the next steps) there were no detailed solutions elaborated. Nevertheless the discussions spawned useful inputs for further work. We are looking forward to implement and test these ideas, and first results seem to be very promising. Time will tell how reliable these results of the sentiment analysis are – and if and how the methods can then be used in practice.